Nearly three decades have passed since playwright and activist Larry Kramer rocked Broadway
with The Normal Heart, his dramatic account of the fear and anger that gripped gay America
during the early years of the AIDS epidemic.
Now HBO has brought The Normal Heart to film.
The movie transports us to a time before the deadliest plague in six centuries had a known
cause or any effective treatment.
The New York City terrified gay activists lashed out at government officials for moving
too slowly to find the tests and treatments needed to save their lives.
Kramer sat for an interview with the Today Show's Jane Pauley in February 1983, just
months after he co-founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis Task Force.
That's the organization that would soon spark an international activist movement.
The interview is a vivid reminder of how the new illness caught the whole world off guard.
On after eight this morning, a puzzling disease that is spreading, it's called AIDS, AIDS.
It breaks down the body's immune system and 400 people are dead from it.
Researchers are concerned that the rate of the disease is accelerating now.
With me in New York is Larry Kramer.
He's co-founder of the Gay Men's Health Crisis Task Force and you've been trying to educate
people about AIDS.
How many friends have you lost to this disease?
Twenty.
Twenty?
Yes.
And you have still more friends who are sick?
Very ill.
Jane, can you imagine what it must be like if you had lost 20 of your friends in the
last 18 months?
And you don't know why?
No cause, no cure, people in hospitals.
We can't, it's a very angry community.
Angry at home?
We feel like a disenfranchised community.
We can't seem to get the government, the National Institutes of Health to accelerate
the research that's going on.
We can't even get the mayor of New York City to acknowledge publicly that there's a health
emergency crisis going on.
We feel very isolated.
Down in Atlanta, 20 full-time physicians and 80 part-time professionals are looking
into AIDS.
That's not enough?
Those men, and they're doing wonderful work at the CDC, that's epidemiological research.
That's the keeping of statistics.
I'm talking about medical research, laboratory research.
Hospitals all around the country, doctors are begging, they're $55 million worth of
grants at the NIH waiting to be judged.
In this disease, many people feel lies the secret to what causes cancer in general.
Why is the NIH dragging its heels so?
By exposing and protesting the reluctance of political leaders to address a disease that
first struck gay men and injecting drug users, the activists awakened the world to a problem
that would soon spread far beyond those stigmatized groups.
Do you are raising the possibility that people are dismissing it because it strikes mostly
the gay community?
There is no question in my mind, if this were happening to you and the white, straight,
middle-class community, it would have been attended to a long time ago.
Well, maybe it is.
That may well be happening.
Dr. Jaffe, what about the possibility, as some say, that this disease is now being spread
through blood banks?
There is some suggestion that it can be transmitted through blood, and clearly it's now a problem
among hemophiliacs.
We also are looking at a few cases, non-hemophiliacs, who receive blood for other reasons, operations,
accidents, and so on, who may have acquired AIDS in that way.
I think it's important to recognize, though, that this risk at present is extremely small,
and people certainly should not be refusing blood that they need because of this concern.
What are the risk factors, Dr. Jaffe?
Do you know at least that much?
We know among homosexual men that those with large numbers of sex partners, particularly
anonymous sex partners, are at the highest risk.
We think hemophiliacs are at risk because of the blood products they have to receive
for treatment.
Mr. Kramer, the gay community in New York, you said, was angry.
Is it changing its behavior at all because of this and reaction?
I think you could say that, yes, I think we're afraid to touch anyone, even in friendship
now.
It's a city really in stress and duress.
Finally, Dr. Jaffe, is it inevitable that this AIDS is going to spread to the general
population?
It's very difficult to predict, but if it is caused by an infectious agent, and we
think it is, and it's transmitted from person to person, one would think eventually everyone
would be at some risk for the disease.
Thank you for being with us in Atlanta and Larry Kramer in New York.
We'll be back in a moment, but first, this is today on NBC.
It would take another year for scientists to pinpoint the cause of AIDS, a blood-borne
virus called HIV, and it would take 13 more years to develop treatments that could control
the infection.
Three decades later, HIV is a manageable condition in rich countries.
It remains a major killer in poor ones.
